「日本的哲学」の特徴付け

西田幾多郎の思索に沿って

抄録

Following the publication in 2011 of the Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook (University of Hawaii Press), the field of Japanese Philosophy is seeing a remarkable global burgeoning. Riding this wave of momentum, The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Contemporary Japanese Philosophy has just been published in September 2017. The present essay is a continuing reflection of my “Introduction” to this Bloomsbury volume. Therein I originally turned to Nishida’s endeavor as a guide to characterize “Japanese Philosophy.” Nishida’s view of direct experience to be culturally colored led me to unfold my own intercultural reflection on the connection among culture, experience, language, and perception, and I came to realize that the nature of cognition is closely bound up with recognition. I discover that I do not know what I do not hear (especially in reference to things in a different cultural context from my own; a“thing”here is broadly defined, extending from abstract concepts to concrete tangible things). Turning this observation the other way, if I can “hear” a thing in a different culture, I can “know it,” and my knowledge of the thing pushes its existence onto the horizon of my experience. By following Nishida’s philosophical inquiry, I attempted to characterize “Japanese philosophy” with the renewed appreciation of his insight that there is“a logic that is concerned with the workings of the mind, while there is another type of logic that is concerned with the object of consciousness.”